[hermanradtke]

It reads to me that your company lacks standards and expectations to hold employees accountable. The in office culture uses the proximity of people to work around the lack of standards and expectations.

If the standards did exist then bad design doesn’t make it through design review or code review. If expectations did exist, then the employees manager is having a conversation about lack of documentation being a problem that needs to be fixed.

Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.

[cauch]

That's an extremely naive view of the reality. Bad employees exist, and the mentality amongst Devs is pretty bad. This is visible in this kind of thread where the first instinct of a lot of commenters is to blame everything on management without even think if sometimes part of the problem is due to unprofessional devs.

I'm not saying that everyone against RTO is a bad employee or is biased (I'm against RTO myself). I'm just highlighting the unbalance and the strong unawareness of this aspect.

For those unprofessional devs, it is ridiculous to pretend that "a better standards" will magically turn an a*hole (to take an extreme case) into an angel. You are talking about "work around", but this is not a work around, this is a relatively efficient and pragmatical way of dealing with this kind of problem. What you propose seems to fall apart as soon as the dev has a tantrum and has decided that something is not like they like.

You seem to assume that none of what you are proposing has been tried, despite it being obvious. (and it also does not mean that we are not going to continue to do that, but it is just stupid to pretend that "working from the office" is forbidden while it helps a lot to ease the problems)

Let's also notice that supervising and controlling the standards to catch it up each time it slips is a lot of effort, it is pretty risky, and the devs hate it and then blame the management. What you are saying is that the management should work very very hard to accommodate an a*hole, and at the same time, asking the a*hole to make a small sacrifice is unacceptable.

> Let us not blame remote or in-office for the problems of poor management.

The point of my comment is "let us not blame management when they are trying to solve problems of devs unable to understand that their own comfort is not the centre of the universe".

Let be clear: I'm not supporting forcing working in the office. What I'm saying is that the large majority here are behaving exactly like my problematic colleague behaves, pretending that it is obviously a management problem when in fact maybe the management is just trying their best to find a pragmatical solution. As far as I can tell, RTO can be the result of management trying their best because the devs are not accepting that something is inefficient in the way they are working. It may not be the case, but the problem is that people here are convinced it is not the case, not because they have proofs, but because it is what they want to believe.